THE LOCAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE: TAKING STOCK

The ILGDP survey provides information about the presence of local media systems, their coverage of local public affairs, ownership, and audience size. Chief administrative officers of over 2,000 municipalities in Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Romania were asked, among other questions, how many media outlets cover public affairs “from time to time” in their municipalities (from zero to eight or more). Table 3.1 shows that a large number of localities possess no media outlets.² Of the 29,460,752 inhabitants living in the self-government units included in the survey, almost 8% have no access to information about local public affairs. At the other end of the spectrum, nearly 40% of the population lives in media-rich environments, i.e., with access to six or more outlets.

The number of media covering local public affairs varies significantly from one country to the next. Only 2% of localities in Poland and 3% in Latvia have no such outlets.

In Hungary and Romania, on the other hand, 45% and 51% of the localities do not count any local media.

The Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) respondents were also asked to provide details about the owner(s) of local outlets, the extent to which the local media provide coverage on local public affairs and how many citizens they reach. Differences between localities and countries are observed with respect to these attributes as well. (See appendix I for the distributions by country.)

National surveys are another source of information on the extent to which people attend to local media. According to the Public Opinion Barometer surveys³ carried out in Romania between 1995 and 1997, the proportion of Romanians who read local dailies hovered around 20% for those who read a local newspaper the day before and

Table 3.1

Localities per Number of Media Outlets [%] (2001)

Media outlets Pooled data set Latvia Hungary Poland Romania

0 30 3 45 2 51

1 17 18 30 8 12

2 16 34 14 13 13

3 12 21 5 21 7

4 8 11 3 15 6

5 9 8 2 20 7

6 3 3 1 6 1

7 2 1 0 6 1

8 and more 4 2 1 10 2

N= 2023 N=241 N=646 N=579 N=557

Note: Percentage figures may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Unweighted data.

Source: Local Government Survey of the ILDGP, 2001.

up to 36% for those who read one in the previous seven days. In Hungary, more than 30% of respondents who participated in a recent survey reported reading a regional daily every day or several times a week. Fewer than 15% said they listen to local radio or watch local television channels equally frequently.⁴

The 1999 Polish General Social Survey showed that almost 54% of the 1,143 respondents read a regional newspaper at least once a week, while 27% stated they never read such newspapers (the data reveal little difference between readership of regional and national papers). A little more than 51% of respondents read national papers at least once a week, while nearly 32% claimed never to read them.⁵

Finally, according to a survey conducted in Latvia in 2000, of nearly 1,000 respondents who were asked which newspaper they read most often and consider as their main source of information, almost 15% identified local and regional publications.

When asked about their newspaper consumption, 23% said they regularly read a regional or local paper in Latvian, and 9% a regional or local paper in Russian. Only 6% reported listening to local radio programs.⁶ While these numbers come from observations at a single point in time (except in the case of Romania) and provide more information about print than broadcast outlets, they show that consumption of local media in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Latvia is far from negligible.

2.2 Links between Media, Citizens, and Local Government Performance

The belief that the media make a difference to the quality of democracy is not new.

Alexis de Tocqueville underlined the connection between civil society and media in his famous Democracy in America. To secure cooperation, individuals have to be persuaded that they serve their private interests by “voluntarily uniting [their] efforts to those of all the others. That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers. ... So hardly any democratic association can carry on without a newspaper” (1990, 112–113).

The need for communication channels between citizens also arises from the complexity of modern policymaking. Citizens require good information and access to discussion about the merits of policies, particularly since it is impossible for any one individual to pay attention to how a city is run all the time or to possess all the necessary knowledge to evaluate representatives’ every decision (Page 1996, 2). Nowadays, the mass media (notably television) have become the prime source of political information (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993), enabling citizens to identify and articulate their interests, to voice them at election time, and to participate in public life in general.

Factual political information “assists individuals in their civic actions, helps explain

group differences in political access, and serves as a collective good, strengthening the likelihood that the polity functions both responsively and responsibly” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, xi). Except in very small communities, where interpersonal communication provides nearly all strata of local society with access to information about local affairs, the development of meaningful democracy (rather than just a more or less liberal oligarchy) at the local level clearly requires substantial and diverse media coverage of local politics.

In classical liberal theory, this requirement was fulfilled by the existence of a marketplace of ideas ensuring that citizens are exposed to diverse information and points of view. Even if individual outlets were biased, competition would allow media consumers to weed out true information from the false. From the early to mid-20^th century onward, this idea of the press as the cornerstone of representative democracy

—the “fourth estate”—gave way to calls for a more defined, substantial role for the media. In the modern media context, competition was found either to be unrealized or to privilege profit-making over other goals such as achieving political and other freedoms. These changes gave rise to the notion of social responsibility of the media, media ethics, and the development of journalists’ professional roles such as that of “watch dog” (see McQuail 2000, 146ff. for a detailed account of these developments). In this role, journalists and the media in general act as a check on authorities’ power, ready to expose wrongdoings (Kocher 1986; Weaver 1996).⁷ Thus, media “publicity provides an effective external control over the competence, responsiveness and accountability of public officials” (Swoboda 1995).

Reasons to suppose that the media have an effect on local government performance are not only based in normative theories and journalists’ discourse about their profes-sional role. They are also rooted in two strands of research about media effects. The first leans toward cognitive psychology and examines how media consumption or exposure affects people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Studies belonging to this group have been preoccupied with how people (and which people, in terms of socio-demographic characteristics) learn and retain political information distilled by the media. Delli Carpini and Keeter’s seminal book about the determinants of political knowledge in America is a good example. Literature focusing on electoral campaigns has also contributed to this stream, notably the agenda-setting theory and its extension, priming. Agenda-setting holds that the media are able to influence what issues people think about. Priming takes place when the media influence the importance that people assign to different issues or considerations when making a choice (Iyengar 1991). A number of studies specifically concerned with the impact of local media have addressed the relationship between media consumption and community ties (Neuwirth, Salmon, and Neff 1989), and between local media use and participation in local public affairs (McLeod et al. 1999; McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy 1999).

A second stream of research concentrates on media effects at the aggregate rather than the individual level. Recent studies have examined the association between access

to media as well as media freedom on the one hand and good governance⁸ on the other (Norris 2001). Links between the media ownership structure (public or private) and national indicators of education, health, and freedom are another focus of interest (Djankov, McLiesh, Nenova, and Shleifer 2001). Studies in this group address media effects from a wide range of perspectives, including links between various local media characteristics such as competition, ownership, and content (Lacy 1989; Bernstein and Lacy 1992; Lacy, Coulson, and St. Cyr 1999). Media features have also been linked with aspects of the local environment such as diversity of public opinion or ethnic heterogeneity (Lasorsa 1991; Johnson and Wanta 1993; Hindman, Littlefield, Preston, and Neumann 1999).⁹ None of these studies provides an applicable framework of analysis for examining the relationship between media and decisional or democratic performance of local governments. However, they do provide a useful theoretical and empirical background against which to set it.

Another related strand of research, mostly qualitative but not exclusively so, has been concerned with the impact of media on public policy and on policy-makers. Do media have a direct impact on governmental decisions and the opinions of the decision-makers, or does public opinion first mediate this influence?¹⁰ The question is relevant to the concerns of this chapter. Media effects on local government procedures or policies can occur when citizens learn the information they need to hold their representatives accountable, to engage actively in local public life, and so on. The media can also affect local representatives directly and, consequently, their performance as those who make the decisions and establish the rules for how those decisions are arrived at. “Media attention to an issue affects legislators’ attention, partly because members [of Congress]

follow mass media like other people, and partly because media affect their constituents,”

notes Kingdon (1995, 58). In their study, Lomax Cook et al. (1983) found that media reports about fraud in public programs had an impact on policymakers’ opinions and on policy mostly because of the “active relationship” that developed between journalists and policymakers, rather than as a result of pressure from public opinion.

These last remarks highlight the complex nature of media effects. The aggregate nature of the available survey data does not allow for a full account of the mechanisms underlying local media influence on the performance of local governments in Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Romania. Nonetheless, the analysis will generate useful insights on how local media work in the region, and what influence they have on (some of ) the nuts and bolts of local democracy.